25 years have passed since the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars. This new wars in Europe shook the perception that the structures built after WWII would ensure lasting peace. As part of the buildup of nationalism, during the conflicts and afterwards, testimonies were used by the official establishments of each country seceding and succeeding Yugoslavia - in the media, in school textbooks, or historical exhibitions - to justify their own national, ethnic, or religious position, while those that were not willing to justify these positions were silenced through direct political repression and systematic erasure of the frame of reference that relates these testimonies to the reality they presume to represent. This exhibition builds on the testimonies of war participants and antiwar activists, interviewed by their peers – fellow fighters, family members, neighbours, artists, and activists. They show the functioning of the system and the continuity and discontinuity through time. It is precisely this testimony that reveals the way the system functions in all its aspects - political, economic, social, and cultural - rather than the testimony of one’s own suffering that Primo Levi defines as political. They show that testimonies act to complexify, layer, and sometime oppose the hegemonic historical narrative or “the official truth”, for instance by exposing the socio-economic motivation and benefits of the war, as well as to reflect a common experience of these wars and their consequences. Since witnessing is a participative act, testifying is an act of speech with multiple addressees at once, in the least; those relating to the situation testified upon, the situation of testifying, and a self-address which constitutes multiple speakers. The simultaneity of time and space creates an ever changing assemblage of singular-plural social relations, intimate and political, at work much after the testimony has been given and anew each time it is heard. The diversity of social relations at the base of testimony makes its relation to reality complex, both that experienced as well as that in which testimony is heard. This makes it unstable for the purpose of the listener who demands The Truth, i.e. a comprehensive meaning which would constitute the person testifying as Subject and both testifying and testified factual situations as Events.
Thirteen artists and artistic duos were selected through an open international call. Their approaches to the process of art production range from archival research to participatory audio-visual anthropology, and statistical and technological rethinking produced audio works that display a wide range of formats (media), from music composition and performances to visual and audio installations. In addition, the exhibition will present a testimony archive - a social network portal that will allow visitors to listen and search the interviews (in BHS, Italian, and English) as well as to compile their own narratives. The exhibition will open a channel through which these testimonies can be heard and contextualised.

This exhibition is curated by Noa Treister, Dr Zoran Erić, and Giorgia Lucchi.
It is part of the project TESTIMONY – TRUTH OR POLITICS: The Concept of Testimony in the Commemoration of the Yugoslav Wars, led by The Center for Cultural Decontamination (Belgrade, Serbia) in cooperation with several cultural organisations from four European countries, and co-financed by the Europe for Citizens Programme 2014-2020.